My name is Keith and I'm new to steemit and here because of my insatiable interest in cryptocurrency. Due to the learning curve created by the gap in technology between users and developers, I've been inspired to blog about my struggles and findings along the way in an effort to help others shorten the curve and avoid some of the mistakes I have made!
Lesson 1: No Tipsy Trading
I bought into a little bitcoin cash earlier this year and stored it on btc.com which is a web wallet service that currently accommodates Bitcoin and BitcoinCash which I will refer to as BTC and BCH respectively, moving forward. Upon logging in, there is a drop box with which you can toggle between the two separate wallets. Impatiently, I sold off all of my BCH and dumped into other coins.
When the segwit2x hard fork was retracted, I happened to be out having a few beers and monitoring my crypto portfolio via Blockfolio (I check that thing like every 10 seconds...) BCH skyrocketed to about $2000 USD... for fear of missing the boat on a currency that was presumably to overtake bitcoin, I (in a drunken frenzy) exchanged a portion of my BTC investment for BCH, the destination address to be my BTC.com BCH wallet....... but..... I forgot to toggle! I sent hundreds of dollars of BCH to a BTC wallet. I waited five minutes... ten minutes... fifteen..... no deposit. The transaction had been completed on the exchange but the funds never showed up. I realized BCH wallets are not designed to hold BTC and vice versa. I submitted about 3 different support tickets in a frantic effort to recover funds... low and behold, after surfing the web for a while, BTC.com actually has a tool to help you recover funds if you make this mistake. Link below.
The moral of the story is, be careful and double check when making transfers, trades, etc. It is very possible to lose cryptocurrency by being careless. Fortunately this was not an expensive lesson for me.
Thanks for reading,
Keith